What shipped, when

Seven new prompts in /prompts/code, all targeting AI-builder workflows where verification is the bottleneck:

• Design a verification gate for an AI agent step — treat agent output as hypothesis, define what's checked before it's trusted downstream.
• Review AI-generated output as a hypothesis — sort verified vs assumed vs possibly fabricated, ranked checks to run before accepting.
• Audit a spec for hidden assumptions — find the gaps before an agent or junior engineer fills them with guesses.
• Scope a new build phase with testable acceptance criteria — phase-gated, with explicit exit conditions.
• Generate a debugging hypothesis tree — ranked by likelihood × cheapness-to-verify, not by what's most interesting.
• Design a Postgres data model for a feature — schema, constraints, indexes, denormalization decisions with reasons.
• Write a technical decision record (ADR) — for future-you, six months from now, having forgotten everything.

The /code prompt count is now 20 (was 13).

New post at /blog/pre-deploy-checklist: a 24-point checklist across eight categories (secrets & auth, database, AI costs, frontend, error handling, rate limits, observability, rollback) for AI builders who get 90% of the right decisions and 10% of the catastrophically wrong ones. Includes a copy-paste version.

Major discoverability pass so AINews shows up in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT citations, and Perplexity:

• New /llms.txt — structured site index for AI crawlers (700+ lines covering every hub, blog post, comparison, glossary term, tool, skill, prompt category, role page, guide, and recent news article). Generated from the same data sources as /sitemap.xml.
• JSON-LD structured data — Organization + WebSite + SearchAction schemas on the homepage; BlogPosting + BreadcrumbList on every blog post. Sitelinks searchbox now eligible.
• Per-post OG images — every blog post now gets a unique 1200×630 image with its title as hero, auto-generated at /blog/[slug]/opengraph-image. Used in social sharing, Twitter cards, LinkedIn unfurl, Slack previews, and BlogPosting JSON-LD.
• Default openGraph.images on layout so every page has a fallback social preview.

Post-promotion sends now lead with the post as hero (with its per-post OG image), not buried under changelog cards. Changes:

• Hero image on top is post-specific (no longer the generic site OG)
• Subject line is the post title (no "AINews · X updates" prefix when promoting a post)
• Larger H1 (30px, weight 800) and CTA button (14×26 padding, 15px font) — matches the site's hero proportions
• Changelog moved to a compact "Also this week" list at the bottom
• Dropped meaningless FEATURE/CONTENT tag pills that appeared on every card
• Digest-only mode (no post) keeps the existing card layout

New post at /blog/vibecoding-what-to-think-about: the five things that actually break when non-engineers ship AI-built apps — API keys in the frontend, fake auth, prompt-deletable databases, uncapped costs, and the "works for me" trap — with a fix for each.

Four changes shipped together:

• New section at /open — opinionated explainer of open-source AI. What "open weights" actually means, the models that matter in May 2026 (DeepSeek V4, Llama 4, Qwen 3.5/3.6, Kimi K2.6, gpt-oss), where to run them, and the open tools built on top. Decision matrix for open vs frontier plus the licensing pitfalls people miss.

• OpenClaw added to the tools catalog — Peter Steinberger's autonomous local AI agent, the fastest-growing open-source project on GitHub. MIT-licensed; runs locally; acts via WhatsApp / Telegram / Discord / Signal with persistent memory.

• "Blog" renamed to "Posts" in nav, footer, and section headers. The content type stays identical (weekly long-form notes); the label was journal-flavored, the actual posts are practical playbooks. URL /blog/[slug] unchanged.

• 17 new sources in /news — Anthropic, Anthropic Engineering, Claude Code Changelog, Google AI, Meta AI, xAI, Mistral, Cohere, Thinking Machines, The Batch, Perplexity, Together AI, Groq, Ollama, Vercel, Windsurf, Simon Willison. Up from 20 to 37 feeds total.

Companion to yesterday's post on hallucinations, loops, and confident-wrongness. New skills you can install:

• AI Output Verifier — audits AI-generated code for hallucinated APIs and silent rewrites
• Loop Breaker — diagnoses why an agent is stuck and produces a clean restart prompt
• Context Grounding Brief — builds the context bundle that prevents hallucinations before they happen
• AI Feature Pre-Ship Checklist — verification checklist for AI-built features before they touch real users

New prompts in /prompts/code (verify AI code, escape an agent loop, ground context before coding), /prompts/productivity (set a time budget for AI tasks), and /prompts/analysis (sanity-check AI output before acting on it).

New post at /blog/your-ai-is-confidently-wrong: the four failure modes that actually empty your AI budget — hallucinations, loops, over-broad rewrites, and long-session degradation — with concrete fixes for each.

Major expansion of /coding:

• Mode picker — pick "Just starting / Solo / Production / Team lead" and get the rest of the page through that lens.
• Recommended starter stacks for each mode (concrete picks, not vague advice).
• Repo file templates — copy-paste AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, PLAN.md, IMPLEMENTATION.md, REVIEW.md.
• Verification matrix — when each level (automated / model review / independent verifier / human) is required.
• Escalation rules for risky changes (auth, payments, destructive migrations).
• Good-vs-bad examples for repo instruction files.

Plus 9 new AI builders in /tools: Codeium, Cody by Sourcegraph, Emergent, Base44 (Wix), Natively, Supermaven, StackBlitz, JetBrains AI Assistant, Amazon Q Developer.

Full pre-launch security audit and patch round. Closed:

• Stored XSS vector in JSON-LD (escaped </script> and U+2028/2029 properly).
• DB credential footgun in Next config.
• Missing rate limits on LLM endpoints (per-IP + body fingerprint).
• Newsletter mailbomb risk (rate limit + honeypot + per-recipient cooldown).
• Missing security headers (CSP, HSTS, frame, referrer, nosniff, permissions).
• Removed two obsolete privileged setup routes.

Site is now safe to deploy publicly.

First public version of AINews. Hand-curated AI reference site for builders:

• 128 Claude Skills across 12 packs (developer, founder, marketer, sales, HR, customer success + capability packs for slides, sheets, docs, PDFs, web/UI, diagrams).
• 100 prompts organized by job-to-be-done.
• 178 AI tools with comparisons.
• /learn guides on validation, distribution, pricing, integration, automation.
• /glossary of 80+ AI terms in plain language.
• /for/[role] role-specific stack recommendations.

All free, no signup, MIT-licensed code, CC BY-NC content.